You are here

Cotton’s Entry Starts 15-Month Senate Fight

By Andrew DeMillo

The Associated Press

LITTLE ROCK — Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton’s announcement that he’ll challenge Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor opens a 15-month fight for an Arkansas Senate seat that could be the costliest and most heated in the country. Despite the timeframe, the two rivals are approaching the race more like a sprint than a marathon.

No primary opponents are in sight for either candidate, so the current contestants are wasting little time shifting into campaign mode ahead of 2014 and clashing over issues health care, student loans and agricultural funding.

Cotton, a 36-year-old management consultant who served in the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, announced in his hometown of Dardanelle that he’ll run against Pryor next year. Pryor, 50, a former state attorney general and the son of former governor and Sen. David Pryor, is seeking re-election to the seat he first won in 2002.

Republicans widely view Pryor as the most vulnerable Senate incumbent, especially after Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln lost her re-election bid in the state in 2010. In November, Republicans won control of the state Legislature for the first time since Reconstruction and swept all four of the state’s U.S. House seats.

Cotton, who was elected in November, made it clear in his announcement speech and an interview beforehand that he hoped to tie Pryor to President Barack Obama and the federal health care overhaul.

“Mark Pryor is the reason Obamacare is the law today,” Cotton told supporters at his announcement speech. “He could’ve stopped it, but he stood with Obama instead.”

Pryor, however, isn’t backing down from his vote for the Affordable Care Act. The 2010 law isn’t perfect, Pryor has argued, but he said the state is benefiting from parts of the law such as its ban on insurers denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions. He also cited the plan enacted by Arkansas to use Medicaid funds to purchase private insurance for thousands of low-income workers under the federal overhaul.

“There are things in this law that are working, so my view is let’s take the things that are working and build on those and the things that aren’t working, let’s try to fix those … I know they’re going to hit me on that. That’s the linchpin of their whole campaign, but the truth is there’s going to be hundreds of thousands of Arkansans that benefit from that vote I cast,” Pryor told reporters last week.

While Cotton’s gone after Pryor’s health care stance, the incumbent senator and Democrats are highlighting several votes Cotton has made since taking office in January that they say don’t reflect the state’s voters.

Those votes include Cotton’s opposition to an initial version of the Farm Bill. Cotton was the only member of the state’s congressional delegation to vote against the Senate version of the Farm Bill in July, citing objections to it including funding for food stamp programs.

Cotton voted for a revised version of the bill that stripped out the food stamp provision and said that the issue should be dealt with separately. The approach, however, has drawn criticism from farm groups who say it jeopardizes funding for the state’s farmers.

Pryor said the House bill that Cotton backed has no chance of passing in the Senate and said including the food stamps provision in the bill makes sense from a political and policy perspective. Pryor said Cotton has upset farmers by his vote.

“They understand it’s all in jeopardy right now, and they know that everybody else in the delegation, all five of us, didn’t want this to happen but one guy did,” Pryor told reporters after speaking at the Arkansas Rice Expo earlier this month.

Cotton defended his vote, saying he was still supporting agriculture in Arkansas and challenged the Senate to pass the House measure.

“Mark Pryor is the one who should show leadership in the Senate and move a farm bill that is a genuine farm bill that benefits Arkansas farmers,” Cotton told The Associated Press in an interview before his announcement Tuesday night.

The two have also clashed over Cotton’s vote last month against a measure that would lower the costs of college borrowing for millions of students. The measure, signed into law by the president last week, links student loan interest rates to the financial markets. It would offer lower rates for most students now but higher rates down the line if the economy were to improve as expected.

Cotton was one of six Republicans in the House to vote against the measure and the only representative from Arkansas to oppose it. Pryor and Democrats have criticized the vote, noting that Cotton admitted he was able to go to Harvard partly due to student loans. Cotton said he voted against the measure because he objects to Washington lawmakers setting interest rates for the loans.

Pryor also cited Cotton’s vote against the Violence Against Women Act. Cotton voted against the Senate and House versions of the bill in February. He said last week he objected to measures in the bills allowing non-Indians to be tried in tribal courts.

The House version that Cotton also opposed would have allowed defendants to request that their case be moved to a federal court if they felt their constitutional rights were being violated, but a spokeswoman for Cotton said he didn’t believe it went far enough to protect a defendant’s constitutional rights.

The two rivals, who spent last week traveling across the state at a campaign-like pace, said they’re both prepared for the long fight for the Senate seat.

“I fought tougher battles in my life than any political campaign, and I think that if I can take the pressures in the streets of Baghdad and the mountains of Afghanistan, I can take on Mark Pryor,” Cotton said.

Pryor, who already faced a barrage of television ads from groups on the left and right focusing on him before Cotton’s entry, said he’s ready for the campaign but pushed back on the idea that he’s vulnerable.

“If I was that vulnerable, why are they spending that much money this early? … My preference would be that the campaign not start until 2014, but now that it’s going to be under way, let’s do it,” Pryor said.